Evangelicals – The Evening Descends

Before a word is uttred on The Evening Descends, we’re treated to a succession of harp strumming, pounding drums, indecipherable jabbering, piercing guitars and a keyboard progression that sounds as if it might just usher in the countdown to oblivion. This, the first fourty seconds of opener ‘The Evening Descends’ neatly sums up the record from which its title is taken. There’s an awful lot going on - in fact a bewildering amount upon first inspection - yet all is bound together so prodigiously that a record as exciting as it is original emerges.

Comparisons to the Flaming Lips have been many and are not totally unfounded. It’s not just that they share their fellow statesmen’s weird-out cosmic tendencies – although Evangelicals do follow a fine tradition set by the Lips’, Granddaddy, Neutral Milk Hotel etc – it’s more down to the fact that they can make so many ideas make so much sense. And they do certainly have ideas of their own. Jeff Mangum would no doubt don his cap to the fatal car crashing trip of ‘Party Crashin’’ while Wayne Coyne is probably kicking himself he didn’t come up with something quite as terrifyingly brilliant as ‘Bellawood’s’ tale of the mentally committed.

Chief operator Josh Jones matches the grooves kink for kink and can reach the kind of vocally demented highs and (almost) bittersweet lows that are made for trippy music. Each song is a journey – some more than others (with a title like ‘Stoned Again’ it’s not surprising that you get strapped in for the ride) but the overall exploration is greater than the sum of its eleven parts. The all too readily ADD suffering threesome that produced 2006’s debut So Gone appear to have taken some serious stimulant medication. Yeah, they still sound like madmen, but at least they’re madmen with poise and focus.